Analysts: For US, North Korea step vindicates hard line

North Korea hopes to lure the United States to the table with its offer to resume denuclearization talks, but many in Washington see the shift as proof its hard line is working, analysts say.

President Barack Obama's administration reacted cautiously Tuesday to the isolated communist state's announcement that it was willing to return to multilateral disarmament talks it stormed out of six months ago. But North Korea - which has tested an atom bomb and a flurry of missiles this year - said its return to talks depended on the United States meeting one-on-one to repair "hostile relations."

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly responded by reiterating the United States would talk bilaterally with the North only as part of a return to six-nation talks and sought a complete end to its nuclear weapons program. Experts said that recent sanctions on North Korea, imposed by the United Nations with strong US support, were working better than perhaps even the Obama administration hoped.

The administration - which entered office planning to engage North Korea - has found that with sanctions "they have a very powerful tool, and one that could become even more powerful," said Victor Cha, who was former president George W. Bush's top adviser on North Korea. The United Arab Emirates in August seized a ship purportedly carrying North Korean weapons to Iran; another North Korean cargo ship suspected of heading to Myanmar turned around after being tracked by a U.S. Navy destroyer.

"The real diplomatic challenge is that the North is going to want some of the sanctions taken off if they come back to talks," said Cha, the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank and an associate professor at Georgetown University. But Bruce Klingner, a former CIA expert who is now a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said that influential administration officials told him privately that they were in no mood to ease sanctions.

"The inside view is pretty much what you see publicly. No one is advocating going soft on North Korea. No one is advocating sanctions until the activity that triggered them is removed," Klingner said. The sanctions carry added weight as they are U.N.-mandated, unlike efforts to isolate North Korea under Bush that other nations could dismiss as coming from an unpopular U.S. administration, he said.

"It sent a message that countries are actually going to enforce and implement UN resolutions. So companies even doing legitimate deals in North Korea are more wary of unwittingly being complicit," Klingner said. The State Department said it would consult with China, North Korea's primary partner which U.S. analysts believe has been irritated by its neighbor's defiant behavior.

Leader Kim Jong-Il had made the pledge during a visit to Pyongyang by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. China was the host of six-way talks that also involved Japan, the two Koreas, Russia and the United States